Water Therapy

Mother's Day.  It was a gorgeous, sunny, spring day, and it started out horribly.  I'm nine weeks into my broken leg recovery and it seems that during this time almost everything else in the house is broken as well!

     

This morning, Steve and I woke up to a flooded master bathroom.  My renovated bathroom, completed just over a year ago, is falling apart.  The toilet tank has mysteriously cracked down the middle and I noticed it when I saw water dripping onto the floor a couple of days ago.  I had wiped  it up then, jiggled the toilet handle, and the toilet stopped running.  It seemed fine.  Steve called the plumber who said he could come this Monday.  I turned the spigot behind the toilet, thinking I had turned off the water.  The toilet was silent, so I thought our problem was temporarily solved.

While we were in bed last night, I heard the toilet start running again.  I thought of asking Steve to go down to the basement and turn off the main shut off valve, but it was after midnight and we were both sleepy.

So, this morning there was a half inch of standing water on the floor, water gushing from the tank, water running through the grout of the tiles, through the sub-floor and into the carport below.  The carport where piles of junk still sit from last year's May 1st flood.  
 

I was so freaked out by the floor that I temporarily forgot about my broken leg as I attempted to get on my hands and knees to mop up the mess with the only towel in the bathroom.  Bad move.  "Ouch!"  "Steve!", "Steve!", "Steve!"  Steve was nowhere in earshot and Brian was still asleep in the guest room.  I was in pain trying to get up off the floor with my right leg only able to bend part way.  Somehow I balanced most of my weight on my left leg and got back up.  I hobbled over to the shower seat, sat with a thud and waited. 

     

As usual, poor Steve takes the brunt of my wrath.  I hear him come clunking down the hall.  "Where were you?!", I scream at him while he leisurely plods past the bathroom in his slippers.  "What do you need?", he asks.  I scream, "What do you think I need, the floor is flooded, get me some towels!  I would think you'd be a little more concerned about our floor being destroyed!!"  (I found out later that Steve was outside trying to keep our three dogs from escaping the back yard.  I had heard the ruckus, but I was focused on the flood).  

It took me a few hours to shake my foul mood as I went into overwhelm about not only the broken toilet, but the broken kitchen faucet, the broken water filter, the broken microwave, all the other broken stuff around here, and the crap sitting in the carport for the past year, now wet again.

I don't know when we would've gotten back to combing through the stuff in the carport, if it weren't for today's flood.  And after Brian helped me get rid of a dumpster full of junk from the carport, we went to the YMCA where I spent an hour exercising my leg in the swimming pool. 

Turned out to be a cleansing day!